When these allegations were first made, they were greeted with tremendous shock & outcry. Seven decades after fascism, two decades after the end of the cold war, we were turning into the same police state that we had fought so desperately against. The initial incredulity that our government could be capable of such a thing, quickly turned to outrage.

But then, the news changed. The stories stopped focusing on the legitimacy of our surveillance state, and instead became a soap opera following the adventures of Edward Snowden. Where is he now? Is he going to fly to Russia? Will Ecuador grant him asylum? Soon, even that adventure played itself out in the media, and the entire NSA revelations became old news. The outrage has turned into quiet resignation.

It doesn’t have to be this way. We live in a democracy, and we hold the power to make our representatives tremble. Indeed, we have on numerous occasions wielded this power effectively. When the Watergate scandal broke, the resulting outrage forced Nixon’s resignation. A clear red line was established, which politicians dared not cross. Even more recently, when the ObamaCare website was plagued by an amateurish rollout, the entire Democratic party & every one of its representatives felt the heat. The President found himself facing a mutiny in his own party, and had to take immediate steps to remedy the situation.

A year ago, when news broke of Chinese hackers attacking NYTimes and other leading American corporations, we were furious. How dare the Chinese declare cyberwar on us & invade our privacy? And yet, when our government is found to be monitoring every single email & phone call sent by every single person in the world, it has simply become business as normal.

The NSA apologists usually respond with the bogeyman of terrorism. After heroically fighting off Nazism, Fascism & Communism in the 20th century, it is strangely disillusioning that we’re willing to abandon our core national principles in the name of a few terrorists who can barely mount any sort of fight against us. I wonder what the World War 2 veterans, who gave their lives to the cause of freedom & liberty, would think of us abandoning everything they fought for, in the name of a rag-tag group of Jihadis.

We used to stand for something. We used to fight for our principles. We waged war against Hitler & Mussolini, in the name of freedom. We faced off against the USSR, on the brink of nuclear annihilation, in the name of liberty.

And yet, in the past decade, we have changed. The terrorists attacked us on 9/11 and we have since responded by abandoning our core principles. We suspended Habeas Corpus, allowing the indefinite detention of suspects without even filing charges. We opened a Detention Center in Guantanamo Bay, specifically to detain, interrogate & torture suspects in ways that our forefathers had explicitly banned. Our Congress, Senate & Presidency have all changed hands between the 2 parties since then, and yet, these developments still stand. And now, just to eliminate all doubt of what our nation has become, it is widely known & accepted that our government is tracking & spying on every single person in the world.

We used to stand for something. We used to have principles that defined our nation; principles that we fought for. But if the past half-year is any indication, we have long abandoned any pretense of these principles. When our government botched the ObamaCare rollout, we threatened them with political death, and they trembled. But when we learned of the extent of our surveillance state, we simply grumbled, shrugged, and moved on. Our Representatives in Washington, and our surveilers in the Pentagon, have certainly noticed. The message is crystal clear: Keep our wallets fat, our minds entertained, and we’ll let you do anything you want. If you think America has changed in the past decade, we can certainly look forward to more in the coming years.